Google Project Ara conference set for January, plus here's a look at a prototype device

Google's Project Ara is a little more real and tangible today, thanks to a demo video and news of a developers conference.

The ATAP group behind Project Ara has announced that the second Project ARA Module Developers Conference will take place in Mountain View on 14 January, and that another event will be held in Singapore on 21 January.

Both events will have satellite locations at Google offices in New York City, Buenos Aires, and London.

Paul Eremenko, head of Project Ara, published a Google+ post to announced the events. He said the "principal focus" of the second conference will be the next major release of the Ara Module Developers Kit. It'll be called version 0.20 and supposedly includes major changes and advances.

He also promised to demo the latest Ara prototype and developer hardware and share early plans for a market pilot in 2015. In the meantime however, Phonebloks has posted a video of a functioning Ara modular phone.

The video shows a prototype device booting to Jelly Bean and doesn't reveal too much else. It's still cool to see, nonetheless.

More recently, Eremenko notably revealed consumers would be able to buy Project Ara modules through an online marketplace and that developers could use a Project Ara developer kit to create modules and sell them through the same marketplace.